Ease of Self Install?

[Alex]

I started looking at Loxone about a year back and the biggest draw for me was the wired setup and what appears to be a somewhat straight forward install process even for a DIYer.

Unfortunately from the documentation I can find it is not as detailed and instructive as I would like it to be so I am wondering if anyone has first hand experience?

I've done plenty of 120v wiring and have rewired almost my whole house, but not sure how much of that will translate to installing a Loxone system?

[Duncan]

most of your loxone wired install is low voltage signal stuff using network cable - light switches to loxone, movement sensors, loxone link, dmx cabling, 1-wire etc so you should be able to do that easily, and nothing will be severly damaged if you get it wrong initially.

there is a little bit of mains for power supplies etc, and the big job of wiring your mains sockets and lights direct back to your board and from switched outputs, dimmers, relays, dmx etc - given that you mentioned 120v then i assume you are not in the uk and might not have the same regulatory requirements that we have in the uk, but if you dont know what you are doing then leave the mains voltage stuff to an electrician who is qualified rather than run the risk of electrocution or setting fire to your house!

[TomM]

Alex,

Having installed my own full automation system from a standing start, I completely agree with Duncan that the wiring is pretty straight forward and almost entirely low voltage.  I'd encourage you to set up some sort of test bench before you get anywhere near installation so that you can get some basics working on a small scale and then you'll know what you're doing when you install for real.

Depending on your skillset, I would suggest the hardest part is the programming.  Whilst Loxone Config is incredibly intuitive, a bit of time playing with it using real world applications in your test bench plus a basic knowledge of digital logic will help you loads.

And of course the best bit of advice I read on the old forum before I started was along the lines of: "Remember that all problems can be solved using memory flags and a technical support ticket with Loxone"

My final bit of advice is do not underestimate the power of a good and thorough design and at no point think it is going to be a quick process to create a fully working, simple to use, efficient install.  I have no idea how long I've spent installing my system but on a personal level its in the hundreds of hours plus £10k of electrician time for all the 240V stuff.

[yesimag]

I'm still halfway through my first install so take whatever I say with a grain of salt.  However if you know 120v wiring (properly) then interfacing it to loxone is trivial.  Just treat each relay like a switch and you're all set.  Tom is right, the true bear is going to be in configuring it in a way that makes sense, is intuitive and doesn't create more work than its worth.  In my situation, I didn't know I was going with loxone when I wired the house, so there are a few things I'd have done differently, but I'm pretty well set.  In yours, if you know you're going loxone and your walls are still open, or you have adequate crawlspace, fishable walls and time, you can setup a very dialed system.  This means running all lighting loads back to a central location so you can switch them with the miniserver/relay extension or dimmer modules (spoiler alert: wallet shock.) 

In the house I'm doing now I've got somewhere around 90 lighting/fan switch legs, though not all will necessarily get used right away.  I'm also using very few standard switches (in equipment closets and other non-automated areas) and switching will be done either with loxone touch switches, wall mounted tablets or motion sensors.

[Duncan]

at the early design stage its tempting to plan to use lots of stuff like movement sensors, wall tablets, remote controls etc, and that may well suit you, but maybe not the other household members or the person who visits or who subsequently buys your house!

loxone would have you believe that movement sensors are the answer to everything, but its simply not always true - fine for the pantry or toilet with little external lighting, but otherwise it needs to be supplemented with a degree of simple manual control possibly supplemeted by a handful of air remotes which amkes it intuitive and easy for everyone. - most people are familiar with wall switches and wall thermostats (but you can make these smart and pretty eg knx switches/displays which give you buttons and feedback or menus.

i agree that for an initial self build its vital to put together a test rig with an extension, miniserver, and possibly 1-wire etc and wire in a few lights and switches, then you can test your config for real - a good example is setting up realistic dimming scenes with real lamps before you put them into your house, otherwise you end up cycling through loads of scenes that dont seem to work, which disengages the rest of the family pretty quickly

on my first configuration project im still modifying things after 3 years as i learn new  tricks and simplify programming as loxconfig evolves - currently on version 181 and counting!

back to the wiring questions, there are a couple of issues its worth thinking about. if you have lots of wires being concentrated back to a few areas there is a real risk of inteference between mains cabling. induction at on/off of circuits between adjacent wires can cause circuit breakers to go at random, particularly with the latest revision of uk wiring regs which requires every circuit to use rcd devices. the current induced doesnt match in both live and neutral because some has in effect gone down a different circuit on a different rcd and the rcd device switches off

this can be a disaster and very frustrating to deal with, and can be avoided with some thought about the cables coming back to your wiring cabinet, or else splitting up into a more distributed design with say a cabinet per floor, or even as simple as taking all the wires on one rcd out toghether in one direction, and all on another rcd a different direction so theres no cross induction between wires of different rcd breakers.

either that, or go even more distributed  using loxone or dmx devices in smaller zones or even by room with a local small box, - for example each zone or room can have a mains box with a single mains feed and from that a single rcd feeding a breaker for sockets and a breaker for lights. a local extension or dmx dimmer/relay controls the devices in that zone and possibly has local inputs.  your total mains copper wiring is much shorter and each local box is far simpler, with each zone simply connects together with network cable for either lox bus or dmx or both.

[Bayden]

Hi Alex

I wired my house for loxone from scratch. no significant experience, but from working on many renovations, i know the basics of wiring a house in the traditional sense. 

i have an electrician friend who came around and checked every now and then that i was on the right track. he did the final inspection and sign off

your experience with 120v wiring is more than enough to wire for a loxone install. if anything, from a structural point of view, its easier, because everything runs back to one point, rather than dealing with circuits, sub branches etc

wiring the miniserver is reasonably straight forward, but heres a few pointers i learnt along the way:

 - plan plan and plan. its best to know what switch is going to what input, and what light is going to what output, before you start wiring anything

 - keep your 120v outlet gauge, 120v lighting gauge, and ELV (extra low voltage) separate. for example keep outputs 1-4 for 120v lighting, 5 -8 for wall outlets, 9 - 16 for ELV. this is because you loop the power feed from output to output; if you have a 120v feed for the lights coming in on output 1, and then the next light is on output 7, then you end up with a big mess of crossed-up wires. best to have nice and tidy feed loops from 1 to 2, 2 to3 etc

 - if possible wire up as much of the cabinet as you can, before you install the cabinet. its easier to get the fiddly connections done with good light, sitting at a desk, rather than hunched over in a cupboard with a torch. 

b

[Andrew B]

For almost a month now I've been living in my newly built Passive House with a Loxonp-based system I put together and programmed myself (starting about 10 months ago).  While I had the electrician run all the wires in the house (conventional 14/2 home run to Loxone, cat6 from all wall switches to loxone, cat6 from per room sensors to loxone, and cat6 ethernet from Loxone to key locations).  All my lights are running 24 volt DC to LED fixtures, driven from 3x600W 24v power supplies (and 3x600W marine-duty DC-DC converters for fixtures that turned out to need 15v).  Typically power draw is very low (<100W) and thus the power supply fans are dead silent unless we turn everything on, and even then it only gets up to about 700W.

The downlights are an excellent product from Lauren Illumination (**highly** recommend them!), and for the rest we used standard E26 fixtures with RV/marine 12-24v DC bulbs.  The latter are mostly corn bulbs from 12vMonster.com, with a couple of other types I've been experimenting with -- this is not an ideal solution due to their wonky electrical behaviour and I'm looking for good alternatives.  I desperately wish the guys at Lauren Illumination made E26 bulbs!

Dimming and on/off is provided via a pair of 32-channel DMX PCBs, and these are wired to the house wiring via Phoenix Contact terminal blocks (spring clips... thank heaven for those!).  The DMX signal is generated via the Loxone DMX extension which is working great.  Using a standard protocol allows me to choose from many devices and daisy-chain them together.  The board I chose is working well, although those bulbs caused quite an adventure!!

All the switches are WattStopper 1, 2, 3 or 4 buttons but they are wired back to an Elexol IO72 and an IO24 (80 inputs used, 96 available) -- these are cat6 to a keystone jack patch panel, then hookup wires to the screw terminals (that's the ugly bit).  All the indicator LEDs are driven using a 5v from another small DC-DC converter.  The Elexol boards send Ethernet UDP packets via a DIN rail mounted industrial 5 port Ethernet switch to the Loxone.  Note that all the devices use hard-coded IPv4 addresses so the DHCP server doesn't need to be connected or working for the board to operate.

The sensors are all 1-wire and connected via cat6 w/ RJ45 connectors, wired back to an Embedded Data Systems ETHER box which is queried from the Loxone via the Ethernet switch.

The programming of the Loxone is done largely in 4 picoC custom program blocks.  I have about 2000 lines of picoC code.  I am a software developer (and fairly hardcore C/C++ developer at that), so going this way made far more sense to me than trying to scale up the Loxone graphical programming environment to a full house.  Even so, I have 12 pages in the graphical programming environment.  Currently the lighting system is mostly working (scene support is still a work in progress -- it uses the ~6 3-button switches and the one 4-button switch in the house), and HRV control is working great.  Still pending the heating/cooling system (plumber not done yet).

One of the reasons I have so many lines of code is that my programs read configuration files from a Mac on my network.  These are simple CSV spreadsheet files that encode all the behaviours of switches, lights, scenes and sensors.  Being able to change those parameters and reboot the Loxone without having to edit code is really nice.  The programs cache the files on the local Loxone file system so that if the Mac isn't found for whatever reason the Loxone boots with the last version of the files it started with.  This is working really nicely, but it did take a bit of doing to get it to work!

Three pending problems with the Loxone stuff.  One is the daylight sensor I haven't managed to get to work yet (using an analog input).  The other is that the Loxone 1-wire extension just doesn't seem to work... and its my second one as the first one seemed to get fried early on.  I gave up on the and got the EDS device, and haven't looked back since.  The third problem is that sometimes picoC programs survive a warm reboot!!!  That can be pretty trippy.

The 4 programs:

1) UDP reader to talk to the Elexol devices.  Copes with dropped packets and missed button-up events much better than just using the virtual input mechanism.

2) The lighting / wall switch system logic.  Talks to the UDP Elexol reader, the DMX Extension, and makes heavy use of virtual inputs so that the smartphone/web interface works nicely.  Also does a bit of HRV control (although that is mostly in the graphical environment).

3) EDS reader -- every ~20 seconds reads an XML file with the sensor status from the EDS device and parses the XML to extract temperature and humidity data.  If I find other interesting 1-wire sensors I may add more kinds of data (CO2 and CO would be interested).  The EDS can handle 22 sensors and I'm up to 20.

4) Heating/cooling program -- will be mostly using the graphical function blocks for this purpose, by my hydronics systems has some interesting stuff that needs a bit of custom logic.  Most of the stuff in the system will actually be controlled by a dedicated temperature controller, but the Loxone will act as the house's thermostat(s) since it has so many data points.

Surprisingly the memory load is quite low (21% it tells me right now).  Performance is fine -- the lighting program is the most compute intensive and it manages to cycle at around 60-70 Hz so there is no lag in the switches.  I've been asking Loxone for a real compiler and debugging environment (or at least a compile-to-byte-code compiler) but I suspect this is falling on deaf ears.  I recently sent them my whole config though, so we'll see if anything comes of that.

Sure is nice to be able to remap switches to lights by editing a few numbers rather than ripping wires out of walls!  And having dimming and soft on/off on every light in the house is pretty awesome.  I also like my switch behaviour a lot better than the lighting controllers that Loxone provides built in... being able to tweak the behaviour any way I want is pretty nice.  Now that it is mostly debugged!  There were some mildly tricky problems to track down, but now that they have been it is working acceptably and will improve as I put more time into it.

[Simon Still]

I've self installed all of my Loxone and 240V stuff in the UK with no real experience - I taught myself as I went along.  My electrician has inspected and tested the 240V parts.  

Lighting is the area where the biggest decisions are required at the moment and makes quite a difference to both the nature and cost of your install.  

Standard off-the-shelf lights fitted with LED bulbs are cheap (and excellent bulbs are now available which will last a long while and be easy to replace).  However, they're not easy to dim reliably.  The Loxone dimmers are very expensive per channel. I'm using a Chinese 3 channel DMX dimmer with some 240V Gu10 bulbs.  and it doesn't really work very well - they only work reliably from around 60/70%.  If you try to dim a single bulb it gives a bright flash a minute or so after being dimmed to a lower level  

All my main room lighting is constant current LEDs ceiling spots (from Photon Star) using 1-10V dimmers.  They're 'downlighters' but all actually arranged to light pictures or bounce light from the walls rather than a grid of fixed downlight spots.  I put a central lighting point on each floor where all of the drivers for the lights are located.  This meant my 240V lighting circuit is little more than single cable to each floor and my CAT6 control cables only had to run to the central point on each floor rather than to every individual fitting.  It works but it might be an issue if I ever need to swap out.    

Where I have non-dimming 240v lights I've switched these from the hub points using local relays (controlled by a 24V signal from a loxone digital output) and a 3 channel DMX relay unit.   

I'd reiterate Duncan's views on movement sensors.  I only fitted them in a few places and they don't seem to work very well - simple PIRs just arent sensitive enough to stationary humans.  I have one in the hallway and standing talking to someone at the front door when they're leaving the lights will dim.  Having a much longer 'on' period kind of defeats the object. 

I've kept switches to a minimum - just a single switch per room to scroll through scenes - and kept the number of scenes very low.  My Kitchen has 5, the Living room 3, most other rooms no more than a dim and a bright scene.   

Logitech Harmony for AV control and  Apple Airplay for music.  Where devices have an IP connection I send an HTTP 'off' command as part of my leaving the house macro. 

A single fixed iPad for advanced control (and intercom) in the kitchen.  Aim for  Home Automation - you shouldn't need manual controls for everything.  The single iPad can be used to change schedules for timers or adjust thermostats - if it's something only need to change infrequently theres no need to have a control right where you are.  

 

[Alex]

Thanks for the discussion guys! I've decided to go for for it, for better or worse :)

I am curious though if it makes sense to reuse soe of the wiring to my light switches for sending signals back to loxone? I.E. instead of replacing my hot + neutral + ground going the switch just connect that (hot and neutral) to an input on the loxone to receive events from a push button switch? I feel like this might give me some flexibility just in case I have to move very slowly to make sure the WAF stays high. Any thoughts on that?